It consisted of a circular piece of plastic that had pictures of different animals running around it. In the centre of the toy there was a plastic arrow with a picture of a farmer on it. You turned the arrow to point at a particular animal, let’s say the cow, then pulled a string on the side which caused the arrow to spin around like mad and for the toy to utter the words “The cow says… Moo!”.

Somehow this toy mesmerised me. Perhaps it was the hypnotic spin of the arrow, or more likely just the crackly pronunciation of the recorded voice, but I sat there twisting the arrow and pulling the string until I had heard everything the farmer had to say, much to the annoyance of my mate who probably wanted to go off and play with toy cars or something with me.

A little on the history of this toy then to finish off. The first version was released in 1965 by Mattel and the sounds were stored on a little plastic disc, a bit like an old vinyl record. It has undergone surprisingly few revisions over time, with the first major change being replacing the pull string with a lever in the late Eighties. This change occured after a little girl was blinded by the string snapping and flicking into her eye.

The modern version appears to have more sounds to choose from now, as the ring with the animals on it is now a hinged piece of plastic which can be flipped over like the pages of a book. Apparently the exact same animal sounds are still used in it, although they are now digitised onto a computer chip rather than etched into a plastic disc.

In 1964 that started to change, with the release of the Moog (named after its creator Robert Moog) which was the first commercially available instrument of its kind. The first band to release an album featuring Moog created music was The Monkees, but they were soon followed by other notables including The Rolling Stones, The Doors and The Beatles.

The Moog created its sound by allowing the user of it to layer together simple waveforms of different kinds, such as sine waves. In doing so the sound created by the instrument could be changed to achieve a wide number of different effects.

In 1979 the Synthesizer market was shaken up again with the release of the Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) as it took a different approach. The advent of micro computers allowed the Fairlight to work by using sampled sounds of real instruments, meaning that in theory at least it could sound like any instrument you wanted it to.

However the Fairlight and similar synthesizers still cost a huge amount of money when they first appeared, so remained the preserve of professional musicians, with probably Jean Michel Jarre being the artist who is most often linked with the Fairlight.

Back in the home however, we were pretty much still stuck with our old Bontempi Air Organs or expensive piano sized organs, until the clever bods at companies such as Yamaha and Casio came along and size and cost reduced the innards of a synthesizer onto a microchip.

By the mid-eighties you couldn’t walk into a branch of Dixons without seeing a stand of more affordable synthesizer keyboards left out for demo purposes. There wasn’t a kid in the land who couldn’t resist heading over to the stand for a little fiddle, first plinking and plonking out a load of noises by stabbing at the keys, then locating the demo button (which for some reason always seemed to play Wham’s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go) and pretending that they had suddenly become a piano whizz in the hope that their parents might buy them one.

These home synthesizers were available in a wide number of configurations, with different sized keyboards (from two octaves upwards), different numbers of built in instruments, the ability to sample your own sounds through a built in microphone. Most also featured a usually terrible sounding array of “boom-diddy-ba-boom” type backing tracks.

Another useful ability was to be able to record the notes you played and then play them back again later to check for where you were making mistakes. Some models even then you play back the recording bit by bit by tapping any key on the keyboard, so you could enter the notes correctly first, then get the timing right afterwards.

Starbird was a space ship toy which looked the business. It was sleek and groovy looking, just like one of the ships from Star Wars, and it could be pulled apart and converted into a smaller mini space ship as well. Best of all those was the fact that it made sound effects!

After switching Starbird on it would start to make a futuristic sounding engine noise. Tip the nose of the ship upwards though and the noise changed to sound like it was accelerating to climb higher, whilst tipping the nose down made it sound like it was decelerating. OK, this was all a bit nonsensical for a space ship, but it sounded cool.

Even better though was the little button on the top that fired the Starbird laser cannons. As well as playing a laser blast sound, some little lights under the lasers came on as well.

As if that wasn’t cool enough, the Starbird even went through a little revamp and was re-released as the Starbird Avenger. This had all the same functions as the original, but could also send and receive infra-red. It came with a reflective target which you could then practice shooting at, in a similar manner to the way Laser Tag worked.

Also joining the range was the Starbird Intruder. This was a smaller ship made out of black coloured plastic (so you could easily say that Starbirds were from the good guys, since they were white, and the Intruder was the baddies). The Intruder had the same electronic functions though, and it was then possible to have space battles. If you were able to hit your opponent with the infra red beam it would briefly make the engine noise stop to register a hit.

Sadly I never got any of these toys, though now I’m all grown up I think I can understand the reason why. Firstly, the price (they were quite expensive as I recall) and secondly, the fact that to adult ears it would soon have become incredibly irritating, as this video clip of somebody playing with their old Starbird clearly shows…

Well, the Rub Down Transfers I’m thinking of were very similar to these, and indeed the first instances of them were made by the company that made Letraset. Instead of little letters on the plastic sheet you had full colour pictures which could be rubbed off onto paper or cardboard to make an interesting scene.

Also known as Action Transfers or by the brand name Kalkitos, you normally bought them as a pack containing a sheet of the transfers and a thin cardboard background image onto which you could rub the transfers to make an instant piece of artwork.

Sometimes you also got a special plastic wand that you could use instead of a pencil to rub the transfer down, but I always preferred using a pencil since you could more easily tell when you had rubbed over the entire image, so you didn’t lift the plastic too soon and leave half the image behind.

There were a huge number of sets to choose from, some licensed from films and TV programmes (I remember having a set for E.T.) whilst others were of more generic themes such as wild or farm animals, cars, superheroes and much more.

I certainly enjoyed playing with these as a child, and they have recently been relaunched in Singapore. Head over to the Kalkitos website if you want to learn more though, as they apparently will ship worldwide.

I’m not sure quite what made it French, but it certainly was knitting of a sort. You were never going to be able to knit a jumper with French Knitting, but you could make an endless supply of bracelets, coasters and um, worms? The technique also goes by the names of Spool Knitting and Corking.

French Knitting involves using a (usually wooden) cylinder with four nails hammered into one end. It is often referred to as a French Knitting Doll, since the cylinder is quite often shaped and painted to look like a doll. You thread wool through the cylinder and then proceed to loop it in a special way (which I admit I’ve forgotten) around the nails. As you proceed you knit the wool together to form a long thin chain of circular knitting.

I first tried my hand at French Knitting after seeing instructions on how to make a French Knitting Doll in a Ladybird book full of arts and crafts. You could make one out of an old wooden cotton reel and four short nails. Of course, this option is not really practical now given that cotton reels are generally made of flimsy, mostly hollow plastic, but you can buy ready made ones from places such as Stocking Fillers.

The Garbage Pail Kids were a series of trading cards (that were also peel off stickers) which were initially styled to look very much like a Cabbage Patch Kid, but were normally given a much more disgusting look such as being covered in weeping sores or having no arms or legs, or were having some kind of terrible (though comical) punishment inflicted upon them.

Each of the designs were then given names which played well off the depicted character. For example, a zombie like character might be called Deady Eddie (not sure if this was a real name or not, I just made it up to give you the idea). In actual fact, most of the designs in the series were actually used twice with the only differences being the use of another name.

Given kids often like anything weird and disgusting like this the cards were an instant hit, and unsurprisingly many adults disliked them intensely. Schools started to ban children from taking them to classes because they were too distracting (which I suppose is a fair point), and eventually the makers of Cabbage Patch Kids also forced Topps, the makers of Garbage Pail Kids, to stop making the characters look so similar to the dolls.

Their popularity led to a film being released in 1987 (which failed to set the box office alight and vanished without trace – I can’t say I ever remember hearing about it at the time) and also a cartoon series, which didn’t air for many years after it was created due to the TV companies receiving lots of complaints from parents.

Sadly the Garbage Pail Kids popularity eventually started to wane, and in 1988 they went out of production. However, in 2003 Topps revisited the idea and released a whole new range of cards in the US (I’m not sure if they are available elsewhere, it is possible) and they have continued releasing new sets of cards (they are now on to the seventh series of cards!) to this day.

It was a big orange plastic affair, with a decent sized main keyboard and a bank of big chunky buttons on the left hand side. Pressing the keys on the keyboard made a strange humming sound at the desired pitch, whilst pressing the chunky buttons produced a chord, although at the time I thought a chord was a piece of thick string so what relevance these buttons had was completely lost on me.

The keys on the keyboard were all labelled, though with numbers rather than letters as you might have expected. The organ came with a song book that used these numbers to tell you how to play a tune. Whilst perhaps a simpler way of learning to play, ultimately the numbers were probably a bad idea as you’d only need to relearn the proper musical notation when you progressed on to a “proper” instrument.

It wasn’t long before we got bored with playing unrecognisable tunes so we starting messing about, and soon discovered that if you held several keys down at once, the poor organ started to struggle to make any sound at all. This has puzzled me for years, but it was only when I came to write this post that I found out why this was.

The Bontempi Air Organ, as the name suggests (although at the time I just knew it as an organ) uses air to produce its sound. A fan blows air through a pipe, and pressing the keys opens and closes little holes in that pipe. Pressing too many keys caused to many holes to open and the air generated by the fan inside was just not strong enough to produce a noise.

Bontempi themselves are an Italian company, and whilst they no longer make air organs, they are still in the children’s toy instrument market, with a range of electronic keyboards, guitars, xylophones and the like.

However, there was a sudden fad for the Yo-yo when I was at secondary school, which is why I’m writing about them. A friend of mine brought his into school one day and started doing a few very simple tricks with it. Up to that point I had of course played with a Yo-yo before, but all I ever did with it was make it go up and down the string, which got a bit boring after a while.

My friend kept throwing his Yo-yo out in front of him and looping the loop with it, and at that point I was hooked. At the first opportunity I went Yo-yo hunting, and I ended up with a cheap metal Yo-yo that was blue with a picture of a panda on it, but it was all I could find, so it would have to do. I started practising and before long was copying my friend’s tricks of throwing the Yo-yo out horizontally, or performing loops.

I triumphantly demonstrated my new skills to my mate, who then went on to show me his new trick. He called it “the spinner” but I later learned the accepted term for it is a sleeper. With a sharp flick of his wrist he sent the Yo-yo to the bottom of the string, where it stayed, spinning round and round like mad, instead of rolling back up the string. He then slapped the back of his Yo-yo holding hand, and it climbed back up the string into his hand.

I was amazed at this, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get my Yo-yo to do it, so I asked my friend for help. He showed me his Yo-yo, which was made by world leading Yo-yo manufacturers Duncan. He explained how instead of the string being tied to the central axle the string was actually twisted together so that the end of it was a loop into which the axle was placed. This allowed the Yo-yo to spin on the string instead of immediately return back up it.

So, off to the shops I went again, and this time managed to find myself a much better Yo-yo, and also a book explaining how to do various tricks including the infamous Walking the Dog, where you allow the Yo-yo to touch and roll along the floor before returning to your hand. I practised and practised, and whilst I managed to (sort of) walk the dog it wasn’t long before the fad at school ended and I started to lose interest.

The reason this particular memory from my childhood came into my head was that I stumbled across a new Yo-yo made by Duncan the other day. The reason it caught my eye was the price tag. I might consider spending five pounds on a Yo-yo, perhaps even ten, but this baby costs a cool £300! The Duncan Freehand Mg is a precision piece of kit, with the body made from 99% magnesium and the central ball bearing axle being made of ceramic and surgical grade stainless steel.

Personally I could never justify that kind of expense, but apparently Yo-yo connoisseurs are loving it, stating it as being the most perfect Yo-yo ever made. I should think so too for that price! If you’ve got a spare few hundred quid kicking around that you don’t know what to do with, you can get one from Play.com!